Look! Stop! Listen! And Discern!

We all have pleasant memories to cherish. We opt to keep on recalling events that express positively about us, excites our emotion, elevates our thinking, and qualifies the state of our life. Our experience is not just a series of events but a bearer of folded and unfolded meaning of our life. Our memories have always something to reveal who we are. Unfortunately, we sometimes take for granted our experiences, which deprives us to look upon the message that lies behind them. Once we fail to look back to our past, we become blind to our future. We are all products of our past; who we are today is the result of our previous life happenings.

   Our experiences have, indeed, special role in our life as to our vocational discernment. Our life evolves in the kind of experience that we have. We create our identity based on the way we deal with ourselves, with other people, with the surroundings and with the world, which constitute all to our experience. The way we look at things and the way the things come to us build our character and attitude. Thus, the fruits of our interactions between ourselves and with the world in which God manifests Himself are the objects of our vocational discernment. We discern the kind of life we prefer to live basing upon our reflections on our past.

In the sharing of many priests, sisters and brothers, they often times recall their past experiences as the common ground of their vocation stories. Most of them begin their stories with the phrase “When I was…” and follow, “that is why I have chosen to be here”. They don’t simply narrate their stories and mention a series of events; they actually draw the message of their experiences that awaits to be unveiled by their reflections. It is a moment of “seeing” beyond what our eyes can see. The same invitation is given to us in doing the proper discernment: we need to see the soul of our experiences in which the presence of God is seated.

  The proper discernment comes when we think that things are interconnected. In every single day of our life, we have always fresh experience and yet they will become a part of our memories which will soon be a part of our future. We need to stop for a while and see the connections of the events of our life; and we need to listen how they are going to affect our future. If God is always present in our life, then He is always a part of our experience. Discernment is perfectly done when we allow our experiences to speak to us. 

by: Harold Tan, cmf
email: hrtan94@gmail.com